Monday, 19 September 2011

much has already been said of Telstra's re-branding effort, which manifested itself over the weekend in print and on TV. it's all bright, shiny and new, and doesn't look very Telstra at all ... which I guess is rather the point.

I love it. it's optimistic, bright, clean, modern and very disruptive. the copy is actually genuinely really uplifting:

today is amazing. connect with almost anything and anyone from almost anywhere. got something to say? boom ... the world can love it. hate it. ignore it. whatever. stop and smell the roses you purchased online from the shop you just liked. because its never been like this before. it's life in full colour. and it's amazing.

it's also much more than a marketing sea-change. as the below video points out - it's extending into every aspect of the organisation - from the vans to the identity badges...

it's this piece of communication that's much more interesting from a connections perspective. the inclusion of things like identity badges gives it just a slight sense that it's meant as much for internal as it is external consumption; a communication to Telstra's staff explaining what's changed.

it's as though we're listening in on a private conversation between an organisation and its staff - and it feels a lot more genuine as a result ... if its an accident then its a happy one. if its deliberate then it's smart, and the opportunity is to go a great deal further.

the challenge though, starts now. as the VO towards the end of the second video above observes, "we're doing all of this to help us show all Australians just how amazing connected life can be" ... the promise of a life lived in full colour isn't the same as demonstrating to actual people in real and simple terms, what that means. the promise can't remain unfulfilled; the bright, clean, modern and disruptive packaging can't be wrapped around an empty box.

of course if Telstra are really smart, then they'll go the step further of actually making life more colourful for Australians ... what is Telstra's similarly colour-inspired version of this?:

it's a subtle but key mental shift: don't just promise something - produce it. don't just promise more colourful lives, use your marketing investment to help produce more colourful lives. the reach and awareness will come for free and will be more credible because the real conversations and voices of Australians will help create it.

it's what Dulux have done with their promise of colour and its what Coca-Cola, with the recently released content below, have done with Happiness. you can't help but think that the people who created this asked themselves "what would Pixar do?" ... and it's the better for it.

"Back To The Future Nike Air Mags Are Real And Glorious" was Gizmodo's Geek Out's take on today's news. I couldn't agree more

the world was awake, and had been alerted to the existence of The MAG, brought Back From The Future by Nike. as a post on Nike's site explains:

"The NIKE MAG is no longer the “greatest shoe never made.” The mythical shoe that originally captured the imagination of audiences in Back to the Future II is being released – and they’re here to help create a future without Parkinson’s disease ... 1,500 pairs of the 2011 NIKE MAG will be auctioned on eBay with all net proceeds going directly to The Michael J. Fox Foundation. Each day for the duration of the ten-day auction, one hundred and fifty pairs of the 2011 NIKE MAG shoes will be made available ..."

as sneaks go it's a stunning piece of work and - with the exception of power laces - is as fine a replica of Marty's originals that you'll find:

then and now - Marty's original 2015 sneaks and the ones revealed today [source]

it arrived with this beautiful teaser clip:

a clip which isn't alone ... a gamut of content and AV collateral has been released to support the arrival of the 1,500 pairs, and not a corner has been cut - Doc Brown himself is on board:

the distribution model is designed to extract maximum value from the shoes. by selling on Ebay, Nike ensure that - with such a strictly limited supply (there's one pair for every 4.5 million people on the planet) - it doesn't just find those individuals with the money to invest in these puppies, but engages those individuals in what is sure to be a fierce bidding war, with each other, to own their slice of the impossible.

everyone wins.

those of us who have been waiting since 1989 for "the greatest shoe never made" to arrive finally get to see it. a lucky few will even get to own it. the Michael J Fox Foundation for Parkinson's Research will get a shedload of money to fight Parkinson's (even if the average selling price is a conservative $5,000, the MAGs will generate over $7.5m in revenue).

Ebay get a burst of activity on their platform, part of which will no doubt fulfill the hugely valuable role of getting inactive registered users to engage with the site. and as for Nike ... money can't buy publicity, the adoration of sneaker fans everywhere, and a global bidding war to get a hold of their product...

innovate and invest in creating products that have currency and will be in high demand

strictly limit supply

fewer bigger better partnerships to deliver and deploy the initiative

invest in credibility (Christopher Lloyd is in the ad for goodness sake)

sacrifice profits in favour of positive PR and goodwill

don't buy media when you can earn it

invest in sharable high quality content

rigorously control timing to maximise interest and dominate news and conversation

product out, not advertising in

the awesomeness of these shoes is outdone only by the awesomeness of the marketing machine that has announced them to the world. what happens over the next ten days remains to be seen, but for now its all eyes on Ebay - where, only 4 1/2 hours into day one's auction, bids for every pair of size 9s are sitting at between $3,500 and $4,000.

Wednesday, 22 June 2011

Got a big idea that you want to bring to life? Create a plan, share it and make it happen with help from the PlanBig community

so the lovely and awesome Zaac posted a link to my wall of the above effort from Bendigo and Adelaide Bank. it's called PlanBig and, in it's own words, its...

"... a way for people to get together to make things happen and make a difference. We [Bendigo and Adelaide Bank] believed that there was some real value in giving people the chance to come together in one place to talk about ideas, share inspiration, offer advice or help make things happen for themselves or someone else. PlanBig brings together the experiences, knowledge and expertise of people with different skills from all walks of life and all ages to help each other get ideas kick started."

it's a delightful and instinctively attractive platform, which elegantly ticks a range of boxes including - amongst others - socialisation, co-creation, crowdsourcing and gamification. it also has a elegant and seamless execution that connects with the Book and other social platforms... the badges-as-reward effort has been borrowed from FourSquare, as has the Book's Like concept (in fact the functionality is a bit like a social network functionality greatest hits, which isn't a bad thing - better to use functionality with which we're familiar ... makes it more, well, functional).

as the site observes, "Bendigo and Adelaide Bank feel so strongly about helping people realise their dreams, they’ve been doing it in local communities for over 150 years" ... so this platform is just a natural extension of a brand proposition that's been in market for over a century.

it's also another example of the owned and earned media combo (note the absence of bought media) to create (1) utility (2) meaningful connections with a community of people and (3) content ripe for the amplification - if even a few of these ideas get big it will be marketing gold-dust. all of which makes a great deal more sense to me than buying a shedload of ads telling people what competitive lending rates you have.

this genuinely feels like a brand / product extension with sociable and marketable assets built in from the ground up. it's a communication for people, by people, and its infinitely better for it. good on 'em.

Wednesday, 11 August 2010

it has been many moons since Mediation bemoaned Michael Bay's tirade against Paramount's marketing for the dire Transformers 2. you can relive the magic of those crazy days here, but the point of the post was that advertising can't turn a bad product into a good one...

we all have instant access to what the world knows. we can research, reveal and review products and services in a second. no one takes a punt on anything anymore - why would you when everything has been reviewed and rated by the crowd... we don't rely on the promise of a glitzed up poster any more.

I made the point that some of the best marketing stories emerge when communications are a natural extension of product. and that no one knows this better than movies... Transmedia storytelling via the The Matrix, Cloverfield's Mystery Box marketing, The Dark Knight's Vote Harvey Dent ARG to name a few.

the last few weeks have continued the theme of the best of marketing initiatives emerging from Hollywood. the above is for Universal's Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, an adaptation of the comic book series. the whole marketing effort is pretty much text book. there's an incredibly immersive iTrailer (you can put an i in front of anything these days) above, leading to an awesome website which - via its socialrama - is social to the extreme and which actively encourages remixing of the marketing material to propagate content and word of mouth.

the Scott Pilgrim movie website, or is it a comic book? or a mash-up of both?

the socialness of Scott... a plethora of ways to share and engage across you nearest available social network

other recent marketing efforts have continued the innovative theme... this glorious 'Call To Arms' trailer for The Expendables directly takes on the competition that is Julia Roberts' Eat, Pray, Love ...

the trailer observes that the likes of Twilight, Sex and the City and now Eat, Pray, Love, are taking over the cinema, and that this is men's last collective chance to take cinema back. it makes the delightfully honest observation that the place to see The Expendables isn't "off your torrents but in a f***ing theatre (where violence belongs) ...if this loses to Eat, Pray, Love you don't deserve to be a man" - in the spirit of the movie, no punches pulled then.

Hollywood seem to be learning fast. illegal file sharing and the rise of better-than-cinema home entertainment (where you can enjoy movies sans other people talking and on a sofa) continue to threaten box-office revenues. Hollywood need to innovate to keep people in cinemas.

but there's a further interesting angle on all of the above examples of Hollywood entertainment... in that they all start to slash the required marketing budget. they all take advantage of the studios' owned and - predominantly via activation in social networks - earned media.

it's not unusual for a $150m movie to have a marketing budget of $100m+ ... anything that the studios take off their marketing budget goes straight back to the bottom line. movies also have the double advantage of being content rich and very topical, there's a new and shininess which adds to their social appeal.

movie marketing is increasingly getting that marketing isn't about ensuring that as many of the target audience as possible are aware of a movie, rather its about creating value for enough of the right people and encouraging them to propagate your message. the implicit promise... that the product you buy will live up to the marketing, is made explicit by marketing that adds value to a movie's audience before they've ever entered the cinema.

slash your marketing budget via content and sociability that adds value to potential customers. sounds so easy that anyone could do it right? so why aren't you?

Thursday, 10 December 2009

picked this up via a TrendCentral article describing how brands are leveraging the power of AR in the mobile space. there's nothing massively groundbreaking about the above application; we've been talking about this kind of technology for a good while now. but there are however three important things to observe...

it is done very well. its comprehensive, simple to download and seemingly easy to use. its one thing to develop the strategy of having a bar-finder app... its quite another to make one happen. and to make one happen that has clearly been developed with user-centricity (rather than brand-centricity) at its heart is to be applauded.

it was developed outside of an established silo of expertise. specialist iPhone app building agency arossair (not an existing ad, media, or digital agency) built the application for Stella. this is an agency build on the basis of being a specialist not a generalist; of being totally focused on doing one thing well and being famous for it. I can't help but think that all of us in more generalist agencies will have to decide just how generalist we want to be in the future...

...the obvious model that emerges is that the generalists will evolve into central hubs of thinking and coordination, pulling in the capabilities of specialists on behalf of brands and projects as they go. but an evolution to this role brings with it lower margins and potential revenues - especially and specifically in the area of production and execution.

finally, they did it. enough of the talk and the thinking and the chart writing and justification and exploration and debating; and more of the doing. as the early 21st Century witnesses an exponential increase in the things that brands could do, there is a pleasure in seeing a brand actually doing something. 'build it [well] and they will come' could well become a mantra for our times.

Monday, 07 December 2009

so the long and winding road of global climate change discussion and debate has brought us to 7th December 2009, and the Copenhagen Climate Summit. the world's eyes and ears will converge on the gathering as political leaders meet to debate and, with luck, agree the principles of the collective action required to save us from ourselves. an army of bloggers, Twitterers and reporters will all be there to capture - for us and for future generations - how it all went down.

the unprecedented media coverage that is no doubt to come is preceded today by a global media first orchestrated by the Guardian in London. 56 major newspapers in 45 countries have today published an identical editorial piece. appearing in twenty different languages, the piece takes a single united message - the demanding of action - to a global audience. Guardian editor-in-chief Alan Rusbridger noted that "Newspapers have never done anything like this before - but they have never had to cover a story like this before"

collaboration on this scale is unprecedented, and difficult. as the Guardian puts it; "Given that newspapers are inherently rivalrous, proud and disputatious, viewing the world through very different national and political prisms, the prospect of getting a sizeable cross-section of them to sign up to a single text on such a momentous and divisive issue seemed like a long shot" ...but the long shot paid off and - with the very notable exceptions of the US and Australia aside - a united editorial piece is reaching a global audience, and its a good and powerful thing to see.

its a testament to what can be achieved when editors and publishers want to cooperate, made all the more potent at a time when much is being said about the waning power of the fourth estate. and it begs a big question for brands... where's the co-operation? campaign after campaign has been rolled out to the world demonstrating commitment to reduce this or eliminate that - all inherently communicating on brands' terms rather than on the terms of the agenda against which they are developing comms...

the climate change agenda is bigger than any single brand, and some hard-fought co-opertaion could be just the thing to bring some increasingly needed credibility and scale to their - well intentioned - efforts. and if the "rivalous, proud and disputatious" printing presses of the world can do it, then perhaps a group of enlightened, forward-thinking and pioneering brands can too. its something I'd like very much to see.

Monday, 02 November 2009

Nick Dickson pointed me in the direction of this lovely little video which tells the story of how Boondoggle brought music to the web for their client Axion. whilst I'll let the video speak for itself, its worth considering for a moment the elegance of the creative solution...

I've talked often and at at times at length on a theme of "we media and advertising people got this amazing thing to play with called the internet but we screwed it royally by applying 20th Century broadcast thinking to what was a two-way engagement platform, etc" ...what the above bit of creative thinking shows is a beautifully crafted way of doing what we should be doing... bringing utility to the web

as I type this I'm listening to some tunes courtesy of the joy that is Spotify, an ad by Diesel has just done a similar thing - I caught a snippet about how they've created a branded radio station on the platform to showcase new music. thats utility too. and its a brilliant thing.

all this reminded me of the Windows Apple banner wars from a while back, and whilst the efforts of Apple were an attempt to creatively use the space that is the banner / sky, its still an ad.

the gig in a banner concept goes a simple but crucial step further... by being there on users' not advertisers' terms, its adding value to my time on the internet - not distracting me from it. it deserves every one of the five Cannes Golden Lions it picked up.

Friday, 23 October 2009

James barry's The Progress of Human Knowledge and Culture, which - appropriately - surrounded us at the RSA yesterday

“Behavioural Economics provides a floodgate of inspiration to our industry. Our challenge is to ‘chunk’ it down, and apply it in ways which make a meaningful difference to client agency dialogue and communications planning and execution. It’s just the sort of breath of fresh air we need to stimulate our intellectual juices and rise above conversations about time sheets and schedule. It gets us back to the core of what we do and why we do it.”

Rory Sutherland, IPA President

and so yesterday I gathered at the RSA with other industry folk as the IPA, led by Rory, began its journey into the world of Behavioural Economics. and a brilliant session it was. it was such a stimulating morning that I'm at a bit of a loss on how to capture it all - so I'll have a go at listing the gems that I took out of each of the talks before adding some thoughts of my own at the end.

Grist introduced us to the notion that Behavioural Economics are a "patchwork of theories that predict irrational behaviour", (versus rational behaviour as predicted by neo-classical theory) - essentially its Economics + Psychology

Behavioural Economics in action has been popularised by books like Nudge. 'nudges' work by guiding behaviour thru changes in choice architecture... ie its not awareness and consideration that primarily dictate our choices but the context in which those choices are made, here's a good example...

historical consensus has been that there are two systems in the brain; automatic and reflective. automatic is when we take our regular tube journey or are reading a book. reflective is when we have to concentrate on taking a new / different route to work or have to write an essay. but Grist proposed a third element and a new model:

Grist's model of the brain's three behavioural systems

this opened up the interesting question of how much of our behaviour we actually have control over? Grist observed that we ought to think of these brain systems as "libertarian paternalistic" ie they are supposed not to erode autonomy and responsibility - this is achieved thru training; top-down, sideways and bottom up. I then got awfully lost and at one point I fear I scratched my head and squinted.

anyhoo the next stage, for Grist, is understanding to what extent thinking in terms of the threefold system above empowers people to be more autonomous and responsible?

next up was Nick Chater, Professor of Cognitive and Decision Sciences at University College London

his three themes were how we perceive magnitudes, decisions and valuations all without the context of internal scales. it turns out that we have very limited capability to put a value on anything... everything is relative. when perceiving magnitudes we only have about five 'buckets' in which to separate out degrees on any particular perspective on the world. the system is limited at a very basic cognitive level.

when it comes to decision making, we're similarly it turns out "all over the place" - all we have is binary judgments. take for example £300. if I was to say I'm going to put £300 in your wallet, right now, your response would probably be "whoo hoo" or something similar. if however I was to say I'm going to right now take £300 off of your mortgage, your response would probably be "so what?!" or something similar.

...the point is that exactly the same amount of money engendered totally different responses because of the context in which it was placed. everything is relative, but relative in a very limited (binary) sense. the same contextualisation applies when we get used to a variable having a certain amount - so for example in banks money generally goes in in much bigger chunks than it comes out... the consequence: losing £300 is a lot more worse than gaining £300 is better.

the same applies for time discounting... analysis of Google data demonstrates our pre-occupation with the immediate future and our ambivalence to the distant future.

finally, when it comes to perceiving valuations, we can't. we know the price of everything and the value of nothing. experiments with pain (like Dr Peter Venkman at the start of GhostBusters) show how the value of pain (ie how much we're prepared to pay to avoid it) changes depending on how much we have to spend. demand is extra-ordinarily malleable. how much is the value of a cup of coffee? don't know, how much does it cost? £2. I guess its value is £2 then...

then it was up to IPA President Rory Sutherland to tell us why we should care about any of this

he's written a full piece on this in this weeks Campaign, which is a great read, but here are a few of his gems from yesterday...

most successful businesses of recent times have started by figuring out how to make value, and only then worked out how to make money off of the back of that value. as an industry though where we make money and where we add value are different things - we've "hitched our fortunes to media spend", and here's the danger; if - as supply increases - media becomes cheaper, it will have less value to clients (see above) and those clients will skimp on the expense of getting the most out of that media (or other exposure).

people have a preference to solve problems with infrastructure solutions rather than persuasion solutions. but persuasion solutions can be a lot more effective. and we, the communications industry, should be experts in the applied-psychology business. "ad-folk are better at ideation off of a theory" ...understanding and applying behavioural economics is fundamental to the success of most businesses and social problems. he gave a wonderful example, I don't know if its true...

Rolls Royce were having problems selling cars in their regular showrooms. so instead they sold them at Yacht fairs, where the items on sale go for a few million rather than a few hundred thousand. "I think I won't buy that £8m yacht" says mister man. then he sees a lovely Rolls Royce and thinks, "I've just saved £8m, what's £350k for a lovely car?!" ...behavioural economics works.

the last speaker was Nick Southgate, who explored how we could apply all of this

first up brand preference. people don't express a preference when they don't need to. structure is more important than preference, indeed structure creates preference... competitive positioning is very important to brands; it what creates the structure - and therefore determines preferences - within a category.

second, brand positioning. in example after example, introduction of a third choice massively changes the preferences of the first two. one implication - the launch of 'me too' products actually make the existing market leader look better.

thirdly from a creative perspective, testimonials don't work. behavioural economics might help explain why... the plan to make us buy something because someone expresses their preference for it is flawed by the - incorrect - assumption that behaviour follows attitude. but we forget our attitude whilst automatically going on with a behaviour... you get to the top of the stairs (automatically) and on the way forget why you were going upstairs. chimpanzees do the same thing - they will remember that they're looking for a stick to get termites only whilst the termite hill is in view. behavioural economics is something that would seem to apply to all great apes...

and then on to the panel discussion which I won't summarise but instead pick a few themes that emerged...

targeting

it had occurred to me throughout the session, and was suggested by an audience member, that understanding BE presented opportunities for better targeting. does understanding what BE tells us make attitudinal targeting redundant? if we don't make decisions based on attitude, then why are we segmenting people based on what they think? and if so, what should we be identifying and segmenting people based on? anyone?

NB Mark Lund (formerly of DKLW and now Chief Executive of the COI) who was on the panel noted that the COI would be publishing research at the end of November that "will affect segmentation" and that will demonstrate the requirement for another degree of (agency) segmentation.

agency and industry structures

Lund suggested that he believed that agencies will have to get flatter and wider; with expertise spread across a wider number of areas. he referred to the adage that to a man with a hammer, every solution looks like a nail... if agencies are to provide more holistic solutions, they're going to require more than hammers.

Kate Waters, Planning Partner at Partners Andrew Aldridge, observed that "we don't have the right relationships to make our ideas happen" - beyond the buying of conventional media spaces, experiential, DR we have little implementational skill. if BE says we need to be creating structures that influence behaviour, then we're severely limited in the structures we can change. our industry engine is one built around awareness generation and perception change. we may need to seriously reconsider our long-term agency and industry structures.

ethics

a wonderful debate on this one, does the ability to sub-consciously affect what people do give us too much power? and is there are conflict between planning the Change for Life campaign in the morning and a campaign for Snickers in the afternoon?

"there is no conflict" said Lund - paraphrasing Darth Vader, "clients would much prefer people eat less but for six decades ... its about quality as well as quantity of consumption". but this misses the wider point highlighted repeatedly by Waters; much of this isn't new. we've been in the business of affecting what people think and do for a century - all BE does is bring us an appropriate, and consistent, language for what it is that we do.

I'll leave the last word on ethics to Rory - "I'd rather be perceived as evil than be perceived as ineffective"

...

and so that was that. awesome morning and lots of questions raised which now need to be answered. workshops are going to be held in November, details of which are here. I urge you to get involved. I'll leave you with more of the lovely Rory, talking recently at TED. enjoy.

Wednesday, 14 October 2009

one of the biggest challenges and opportunities we face is bringing to life our collective understanding of people in meaningful and engaging ways. beyond the demographic, beyond the observation or statistic, beyond the quote or the screen-grab ...there lies insight and understanding of people (I nearly typed consumer there) that inspires, influences and dictates the best of what we do.

its awesome then to see such interesting work emerging from the boys at BAMM, who sent me a note describing what they'd done for Nokia in Africa...

"As part of an international project for Nokia we looked at bonding behaviours in different cities across Africa, Asia and Europe. The team spent a week with a middle-class family in Lagos. We observed, interviewed, photographed and filmed Amaka with her extended family. We were guests at the naming ceremony for her eight-day old baby, which gave us better insights into how her community bonds."

in a world where more information about more people is more available all the time, experts who can go somewhere, experience a place in time and the people within it, and return with valuable, genuine and actionable insights about what they saw and heard becomes increasingly valuable. whenever I see what these boys do I redouble my own efforts to go beyond the observations and stats and mine for myself the insights that make our communications as meaningful and effective as they deserve to be. brilliant stuff.

Thursday, 03 September 2009

"I don't feel I'm a capitalist, I feel I'm a creativist. Capitalists make things to make money, I like to make money to make things - I love making things."

Eddie Izzard – Live from London (available on iTunes)

I was listening to Eddie Izzard's Live from London podcast - recorded at the apple store in Regent St - recently and was rather taken by the above quote. Izzard was meditating on the theme of the banking crisis and observed that he was, in his judgment, a creativist.

its a great thought but what's even more powerful is the logic flow that sits behind it. think about it. brands and marketers that consider themselves to be in the business of making things to make money will, I suspect, end up behaving very different from those with a mindset of 'let's make money so that we can make more things'.

let's use marketing investment not to make money as an end in itself but so that we can make more (interesting, exciting, imaginative, engaging, challenging, fun) stuff as a result. of course lots of businesses work like this - ROI from one year is reinvested into the next - but its indirect and not by any means guaranteed.

besides that what I think is more important is the attitude, the mindset that this thinking gets you into. yeah, hell lets do some successful communications and make shedloads of money. but let's be explicit about why we want to make money... we want to make money so that we can increase a brand's presence in the world; not by being in more places more often and seen by more people, but by the creation of more things. things created with people, by people and for people, that add value not just to brands but to our world.

from today I'm not a capitalist either. I'm going to be a creativist. and I'm going to be in the business of making money so that I can be the best and most interesting creativist I can be. thanks Eddie.